{"id":23051,"date":"2012-05-12T15:53:28","date_gmt":"2012-05-12T15:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23051"},"modified":"2012-05-12T15:53:28","modified_gmt":"2012-05-12T15:53:28","slug":"finding-a-match-and-a-mission-helping-blacks-survive-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23051","title":{"rendered":"Finding a Match, and a Mission: Helping Blacks Survive Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/05\/12\/health\/a-match-and-a-mission-helping-blacks-battle-cancer.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">Finding a Match, and a Mission: Helping Blacks Survive Cancer<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2012-05-11<\/p>\n<p><strong>Donald G. McNeil, Jr.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A month after his 2009 graduation from Yale Law School, Seun Adebiyi learned he had not one but two lethal blood cancers and began an odyssey to find a bone-marrow donor. Mr. Adebiyi, 28, who came to this country from Nigeria as a child, made appeals through Yale, on radio stations, in a YouTube video and even on a trip to Nigeria to ask law students to volunteer.<\/p>\n<p>But finally, his doctor called, saying that a Nigerian woman in this country had donated her baby\u2019s umbilical cord blood to a \u201ccord-blood bank\u201d and that the stem cells in it were a close enough match. After his own marrow \u2014 the source of his cancers \u2014 was wiped out, those cells were infused into him at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He has been in remission since.<\/p>\n<p>Now he is trying to repay that debt, with an effort that experts say may save the lives of both Nigerians and black Americans. In February, he helped start Nigeria\u2019s national bone-marrow registry, the first in Africa outside South Africa. He is now raising money to start a cord-blood bank there&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;But for African-Americans like Mr. Adebiyi, finding matches is particularly difficult. Blacks are less likely to register as donors; while blacks are 12.6 percent of the population, only 8 percent of registered donors are black.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s lack of education about it, and mistrust of the medical system after <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment\" target=\"_blank\">scandals like Tuskegee<\/a>,\u201d said Shauna Melius, co-founder of Preserve Our Legacy, citing the Tuskegee, Ala., experiment in which government doctors recruited black farmers for research and let those with syphilis go untreated for decades. Her organization recruits donors at Harlem Hospital and through drives featuring black celebrities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPlus,\u201d she added, \u201cpeople are skeptical because you\u2019re collecting DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Complicating the problem, blacks are more genetically diverse than whites. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens existed in Africa for 200,000 years before migrating north to Europe a little over 40,000 years ago, so all Europeans descend from the shallower end of the gene pool&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;It will particularly help those with more African genes. Most black Americans have some white ancestors and, on average, 35 percent European genes, <strong>but individuals vary widely&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/05\/12\/health\/a-match-and-a-mission-helping-blacks-battle-cancer.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finding a Match, and a Mission: Helping Blacks Survive Cancer The New York Times 2012-05-11 Donald G. McNeil, Jr. A month after his 2009 graduation from Yale Law School, Seun Adebiyi learned he had not one but two lethal blood cancers and began an odyssey to find a bone-marrow donor. Mr. Adebiyi, 28, who came [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,2039,6,20],"tags":[10712,10713,2640,1691,2327],"class_list":["post-23051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-new-media","category-usa","tag-donald-g-mcneil-jr","tag-donald-mcneil-jr","tag-new-york-times","tag-nigeria","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}